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What Case Law App can do for you

Provides a graphical representation of Dutch case law for researchers

Allows exploring the network of citations between court decisions

Contains an example network about employer liability

The law is a text that describes what a person or legal entity can and cannot
do. However, the law is somewhat open to interpretation. This interpretation is
done by judges whenever a case is brought to court. Over time, the outcome of
individual cases build what is called case law.

Because consistency is crucial for the fair application of the law, cases often
reference other cases: if the reasoning behind a ruling in one case also applies
to another case, then the ruling should be the same. To warrant consistency it
is thus paramount that any relevant rulings from previous cases are identified.
Conventionally, both the justice department and the defense depend on legal
experts to make this identification when preparing a case. However, court
rulings are often difficult to understand, there is only limited time available,
and even experts are not aware of all cases that may be relevant.

To help mitigate this situation, the Netherlands eScience Center worked together
with Maastricht University to develop an interactive visualization that assists
the legal community at large (prosecutors, judges, lawyers, legal aids, but also
researchers and students) in analyzing case law.

The visualization has been implemented as follows. The collective of cases that
together make up case law can be thought of as a network, or graph. Each node
in the graph represents a case, while the edges represent references to other
cases. The graph is represented visually to make it easy for a non-technical
user to discover which cases are related. By using metrics from graph theory,
such as in-degree, out-degree, betweenness, etc., the nodes in the graph
can be annotated with additional information. The additional information helps
a researcher quickly assess a node's importance.